


Before and Again

by Enigel



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Comment Fic, Community: fandom_stocking, F/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-03
Updated: 2010-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-06 09:41:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/52292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enigel/pseuds/Enigel





	Before and Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [odditycollector](https://archiveofourown.org/users/odditycollector/gifts).



She was the best rider in her household, which meant a lot, considering that she had two older brothers. When she was on the back of her favourite steed, making him gallop fast, faster, through the fields, over the hills, it was the closest she could be to feeling like the birds of the sky.

At night she dreamt of flying chariots and birds of steel, their red eyes following her from the haze of sleep to the light of day. Her family called them night terrors, and sought to make her drink some sleeping drafts, but she found the feel of those dreams comforting. What was there to be afraid of? She'd never been afraid of death. And in those dreams she had a flying chariot of her own, better than any horse her father could buy.

*

They locked her up in a monastery, for her words and talk of flying. The sisters had taken a vow of silence, and no amount of screaming and insulting could break through their solid crust of pity and kindness, pity for the poor mad woman with the broken mind.

*

When the highwaymen came, she whooped in joy.

"Take your hands off the sisters, ruffians," she said. The knife she was clutching felt strangely familiar in her hands, though she'd never held one with such intentions before.

The leader was tall and handsome, and his horse looked strong and well-kept. She had a vision of him riding faster than the winter wind, a rush of leather and steel.

"The Church sits on its riches while whole villages are starving," he said angrily. "Our quarrel is not with the gentle sisters," he added in a calmer voice, "for we see plainly that the church's gold is not used to feed _them_."

She knew all too well the sisters' thin, willowy figures. They lived and embodied what they believed.

"So if they only told us where the treasury can be found, we'd leave in peace and they'd be none the poorer, for their riches lie in their souls, as should be for the whole of the clergy."

She rolled her eyes.

"They won't tell you anything, you thick oafs, because their tongues are tied by their vows."

"Yours isn't," the leader countered.

"No," she agreed, "mine isn't."

*

They adopted her into the band and gave her the horse of one of their fallen comrades. Then there was wind in her hair again, and the thunder of hooves in the dust she left behind. At night she bedded the handsome highwayman, with wild and joyful abandon. It was the closest she could get to flying.


End file.
